Did you know that one of the most essential aspects of successful cannabis brands is influence marketing?

A recent study revealed that marketing induced from consumer word of mouth can generate twice the amount of sales that paid advertising does.

Unfair Restrictions

Due to federal regulations, traditional marketing efforts are off the table for cannabis brands and business. In order to connect with your target audience, your cannabis business needs to resort to more creative digital marketing campaigns.

Influencer Marketing

If you want to promote your cannabis business, you need to consider influence marketing. You can deploy outside influencers to not only maximize your marketing impact but also to boost audience engagement.

Why Use Influence Marketing?

Influencers have a unique capability unavailable to other marketing efforts. They can create content that other people enjoy while developing an active audience that trusts and values their opinion. It combines the viral aspects of marketing with the analytics of online advertising.

1. Know your Influencer

While influence marketing is essential to any successful marketing campaign, remember that influencers are also human beings. Influencers achieve maximum impact when they can enjoy working with their brands and people. You will form a relationship with them just as you would any other colleague or business partner.

There are three types of influencers:

Creators: Influencers that create their own engaging content. These can be valuable when you want to produce content around your brand.

Amplifiers: Curate the best content and amplify their impact via their following. They are best used when a business wants to maintain engagement.

Hybrids: A combination of both creators and amplifiers.

Remember that influencers have invested time and effort into developing their following. They take their influence just as seriously as you take your cannabis brand or business.

2. Choose Wisely

One of the challenges that cannabis brand or business faces is properly evaluating an influencer. We’ve seen too many brands choose influencers with the largest following. While this is important, it’s not always the best decision.

We believe that while the number of followers should be taken into consideration, it’s the user engagement rate that is the best metric for choosing an influencer. It’s far better to select an influencer whose readers are interested in your services or products. A high engagement percentile can make influencers with 100k followers just as powerful as those with over 1 million.

3. Engaging Content

The common misconception around influence marketing is that anything an influencer creates will get immediate response. While this may have been true before, it no longer is. You see, search engines and social media sites evaluate the potential “likeability” of a post. Therefore, if a post is determined to unlikeable, it won’t matter if the influencer has millions of fans; only a limited amount of people will even see it.

Don’t be afraid of trying to entertain to your audience. When you produce and develop humorous, educational or interesting content, you can get people to engage with it in meaningful ways.

4. Stay Up to Date

Search engines and social media platforms are constantly updating how they allow influence marketing to work. When you stay up to date with these changes, you can easily gain an advantage over your competition.

Be sure to keep with the latest trends in both marketing and advertising. When you follow other influencers and cannabis brands on social media, you gain the point of view of a consumer. By doing this, you can better understand the user experience and identify successful marketing strategies you can adopt for your cannabis brand or business.

5. Engage Constantly

A successful influence marketing campaign isn’t just about deploying it every so often. In order to reach maximum impact, you will need to engage with thought leaders and experts on a regular basis. When you publish content that connects, you will grow the visibility of your cannabis brand or business. This will have the added effect of creating a lasting relationship with the influencers in your niche. And by increasing social media exposure, you will build trust with your target audience.

Conclusion

We hope you found this article useful! What do you think of influence marketing? Do you think it’s something you might want to use in the future? Let us know in the comments!

Oh, and don’t keep this information to yourself. Be sure to share this with your family and friends.